carpet. He stepped forward cautiously. It was like walking across a featherbed; he sat down quickly, and the wizard moved aside to make room.
Hanner turned to see Kirsha still hanging unsupported in midair, staring at him.
“Go on,” he said, waving to her. “I’ll be fine. We all will.”
She waved back, then turned and flew away.
Then Hanner turned to the wizard. “I am Hanner the Warlock, Chairman of the Council of Warlocks,” he said.
The wizard looked at him silently for a moment, then said, “I’m a wizard. You don’t need my name.”
Names had power, Hanner remembered-some spells required the name of the person the spell would affect. The wizard was not simply being rude.
“Please yourself,” Hanner started to say, but the final syllable stretched out and vanished as the carpet abruptly turned and swooped downward. Wind rushed past him, yanking his words away. He closed his eyes against the drying wind, and when he opened them again the carpet was sailing into a great dark opening in an upper floor of a building he did not recognize.
Once inside, the carpet settled to the floor, and abruptly became as flat and lifeless as any ordinary rug.
Hanner looked around at a large rough chamber where most of one wall was open to the outside. There were no furnishings, no windows other than the open wall; overhead were the bare rafters of a peaked roof.
The wizard got to his feet, then turned and watched, not offering his hand, as Hanner rose. “This way,” he said, pointing to a small, perfectly ordinary wooden door.
Hanner followed the wizard through the door into a small, bare, wooden room, where assorted cloaks and hoods hung on a row of pegs on one wall. The wizard selected a blue velvet hood, one with no eyeholes, and handed it to Hanner.
“Face that door,” he said, pointing at another ordinary wooden door. “Then put this on.”
Hanner obeyed and found himself blinded-but he was a warlock; he could sense his surroundings with his magic, even through the opaque hood. The wizard stepped forward and opened the door, then stepped aside.
“Walk forward,” the wizard said.
Hanner started forward, then hesitated a step from the open door. He could sense nothing beyond it-not empty space, but nothing at all. Something there blocked his warlock sight completely.
Some sort of wizardry, presumably-warlockry and wizardry did not work well together, he remembered.
“Go on,” the wizard urged him. “Straight ahead, another step or two.” The Wizards’ Guild would hardly have gone to this much trouble to kill him, but Manner still hesitated-something deep inside him did notlike that blank emptiness. He reached out to touch it...
And suddenly he was genuinely, completely blind; his warlock sight had vanished as completely as the light from a snuffed candle. Panicked, he reached up and snatched off the hood.
He wasn’t in the little wooden room anymore. There was no open door before him, no wall, no sunlight spilling in through the open side of the room behind him where the carpet had landed. Instead he stood on rough slate pavement in a vast, torchlit hall. Ahead of him stretched two parallel rows of gray stone pillars, each pillar as big around as a century-old oak, with twenty feet between the rows and each pillar eight or nine feet from the next. For the nearest part of each row, each pillar bore a pair of torches set in black iron brackets slightly above the level of a tall man’s head.
He could not see the end of the hall; the torches stopped some dozen pillars, perhaps thirty yards, before him, but the pillars continued on into the darkness beyond. He could not see the side walls clearly, but they were perhaps twenty feet beyond the pillars on either side.
In the torchlit stretch before him stood a great dark wooden table, strewn with papers and objects. He could see cups and bowls and staves and jewels and books and a hundred other things, mixed together seemingly at random.
And around this table stood a score of wizards, male and female, all apparent ages, in robes that ranged from unadorned gray to the most elaborate embroidered polychrome fancywork he had ever seen.
“Hanner, Chairman of the Council of Warlocks,” a woman said, and Hanner recognized her as Ithinia of the Isle, senior Guild-master of Ethshar of the Spices. “No longer Lord Hanner of Eth-shar. You wished to speak to the masters of the Wizards’ Guild.” She waved an arm at her companions.
“Speak,” she said.
Chapter Forty-two
“Where are we?” Hanner asked as he struggled to regain his composure.
“I quite literally cannot answer that completely, even if I wanted to,” Ithinia said. “You are in a meeting place that is accessible only to the Wizards’ Guild; that’s all you need to know.” Hanner tried to reach out with his magic, and felt nothing at all. He was as powerless as if the Night of Madness had never happened.
“You’ve removed my warlockry,” he said. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
That changed everything. If warlocks could be turned back to ordinary people, then the Calling could be averted, and Lord Azrad’s fears assuaged, and order restored...
Ithinia’s next words dashed that hope. “Itisn’t possible, so far as we know,” she said. “Warlockry doesn’t work here, but when you return to the World it will return, and you will be a warlock once again, at the same level as before.”
“Oh.”
That was different, and less encouraging-but still interesting. Perhaps the wizards could provide a refuge for warlocks who had reached the nightmare threshold and begun to hear the Calling.
“Have youtried to turn warlocks back?” Hanner asked.
“Of course we have,” Ithinia said, visibly annoyed. “We’ve been doing intensive research on that question since the Night of Madness itself. We tried the Spell of Reversal, Javan’s Restorative, the Ethereal Entrapment, healing spells, hypnotic spells, cleansings, holdings, rectifications, instrumental, extractives, transformations, and regressions-multiple trials of each, some of them in slowed or stopped time. We’ve consulted with other magicians; herbalists and theurgists and sorcerers and demonologists couldn’t even do as well as we did. Witches seem to have come nearest to success, and the Brotherhood’s experiments are still continuing, but so far, it appears that once someone becomes a warlock, nothing will change him back. A large part of the difficulty lies in the way warlockry interferes with other magic. We thought we had the answer when we discovered that if a warlock is transformed into something else, such as an ape or cat, he is no longer a warlock— but we discovered that when returned to human form he is as powerful a magician as ever; we can’t transform him into a human who isnot a warlock by any method we’ve tried. Reversible petrifaction did no better. We thought of using Fendel’s Lesser Transformation to turn a warlock into a human being who is identical save for not being a warlock, but we discovered that the spell did not affect the one portion that mattered-the core of warlockry in the subject’s brain. Wizardry simply can’t affect it-not to transform it, nor remove it, nor alter it in any way. The only reason a transformed warlock can’t use his magic is that whatever causes it only operates in human beings; the core always remains present, dormant but as untouchable as ever, in the subject of a transformation. In short, if you’ve come here hoping we can return you and your fellow warlocks to your former state, you’ve wasted your time and ours.”
Hanner waved that idea away. “No, that wasn’t my intent,” he said. He had, as usual, said the wrong thing.
He couldn’t afford to do that again. The time had come to say theright thing. His life, and the lives of all the other warlocks, might well depend upon it.
“I was distracted by the loss of my magic, that’s all,” he said. “I came for two reasons. Firstly, to ask what arrangements, if any, the Guild would like made regarding the remains of Manrin the Mage, and secondly, far more importantly, to offer information that I hope will help you decide the Guild’s attitude toward warlocks.” He looked over the assembled wizards, awaiting some comment.
